Bruce Vilanch, Former Academy Awards Head Writer, to Spill Oscars Tea on Podcast

Attention Oscar addicts: Bruce Vilanch is sharing secrets from his 14-year tenure as head writer of the Academy Awards on a new podcast.

On The Oscars: What Were They Thinking?, Vilanch and co-host Adam “Tex” Davis will revisit some of the most controversial chapters from nearly a century of Oscars history. Many of those controversies will be covered from Vilanch’s backstage perch as the telecast’s top scribe.

The first two episodes debut Nov. 11. A trailer teasing the season was released today.

“If you don’t count sore feet, relatives or politics, the Oscars are the most complained-about thing in America,” Vilanch tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Some of these complaints are as old as the awards themselves, which means people have been bitching for a hundred years. Here is a place where you can relive all of your favorite moments of righteous indignation and find out what really caused them. 

“Along the way, there are a ton of backstage stories and revelations from someone who wrote at least a quarter of those shows and knows everybody, living and dead, who wrote the rest. What a great opportunity to scratch that itch you’ve had since Chill Wills was egregiously overlooked for the first version of 1960’s The Alamo. Or something else awful that happened after you were born.”

Among the burning questions promised to be tackled by the new podcast: Why do so many of the awards for best picture go to one movie when there’s a much better movie staring them in the face? Why have so many actors not won Oscars for their best roles? And why is it that so many movies that everyone loves and made a ton of money at the box office get no Oscar love while little-seen movies rake in the nominations and awards?

Along the way Vilanch will reminisce about Oscar scandals. Billy Crystal as Sammy Davis Jr. in blackface in 2012? Angelina Jolie professing she was “so in love” with her brother in 2000? Seth MacFarlane singing “We Saw Your Boobs” in 2014? Vilanch was there. (He wasn’t there for Will Smith’s slap of presenter Chris Rock in 2022 — but he certainly has opinions.)

The Oscars: What Were They Thinking? is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast platforms.